The Lawsuit Over a Sticker

The sticker was written in response to a petition signed by 2,300 parents over a new biology textbook written by Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine. The text selection was to conform to proposed school board changes that required strengthening the teaching of evolution. In an attempt to defuse the protest, the decision was made to attach to each new textbook a sticker containing a statement written by the school district's legal counsel. The sticker read:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. Approved by Cobb County Board of Education, Thursday, March 28, 2002.

In the legal case of Selman v. Cobb County School District, 449 F.3d 1320 (11th Cir. 2006), Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper decided against the Cobb County School District. He ruled that the sticker violated both the U.S. and Georgia constitutions. He ordered a permanent injunction against schools from disseminating the stickers in the textbooks or any other form. In other words, the court ruled that “the origin of all living things by evolution is a fact. Evolution should not be approached with an open mind, nor studied carefully, but should be accepted uncritically.”

What Were the Parent’s Concerns?

The Selman in the case was Jeffrey Selman, who contacted the ACLU when he learned about the sticker. The ACLU then brought the lawsuit. Selman stressed that his purpose was to support the separation of church and state and prevent the teaching of religion in public schools.

Ironically, the Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine biology textbook openly teaches religion, specifically the religion of Theistic Evolution, the view that God used evolution to create all life, and not as God taught in the Bible book of Genesis. This position was against the 2,300 parents that signed the petition.

My copy of the Miller and Levine biology textbook illustrates one of their concerns. They teach religion, such as on page 161: “Like religious scientists of many faiths today, he [Darwin] found no less wonder in a god that directed the laws of nature than in one that circumvented them.” Actually, the reason Darwin developed his theory of evolution was to murder God. In a letter to Joseph Hooker, dated 11 January 1844, Darwin wrote, in contrast to his original belief, that he now believed “species are not immutable (it’s like confessing a murder).” In other words, species evolved, specifically from molecules to man, which is the title of one high school biology textbook.

Darwin’s new belief was that humans are the product of a blind, mechanical process requiring millions of years. Developing his theory of evolution by natural selection was ‘murdering’ God by replacing Him with another ‘creator’ to account for life’s existence. Darwin knew that the main reason people believed in God in his day (and in ours as well) was the fact that the existence of a creation requires a creator.

The common belief in Darwin’s day was that species never change, although they vary within clear limits. Darwin acknowledged that even admitting departing from the belief that species were fixed was like confessing a murder. If Darwin could come up with another theory that satisfactorily explained the origin of the biological creation, he realized that the main reason people gave for believing in God would no longer exist. This would result in many people giving up belief in God, which history has confirmed is exactly what has happened. Before Darwin the vast majority of Westerners believed in God. After Darwin, among the educated, the majority rejected God. Among leading scientists, 97 percent do not believe God exists. In short, Darwin’s theory has ‘remade the world’, converting the West from the Christian world to the post-Christian world.

As Miller and Levin noted on page 161, due to evolution “humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worse of all, there was no divine plan to guide us…. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless—a process in which the rigors of natural selection eliminate the unfit.”

As evolutionist and atheist professor Daniel Dennett (who died April 19th 2024) wrote on page 519 of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that “if you insist on teaching your children falsehoods—that the earth is flat, that man is not the product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect that …[we] describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods.” The ACLU has gone far beyond this and  in the Selman v. Cobb County case made sure that only evidence for the belief that man is the product of evolution by natural selection is taught.